![]() The rest of the time was them sitting feeling emotional and writing e-mails, going on the Internet or pretending to do research,” she says. “I have people come to me and say: ‘I’ve been working on this paper 8 hours a day and I’m just not making any progress.’ But with time tracking, they find that what they thought was 8 hours was really 45 minutes. But Smith thinks there might be deeper, more personal reasons why they resist. Many of her clients are hesitant at first, saying that they don’t have time to deal with another piece of software. She suggests using something like, an app that is basic, but easy and quick to use. “Time tracking is one of the first things I ask clients to start doing,” says Smith, who spent more than 15 years teaching law at UK universities, in Manchester and Cardiff, and now lives in Ireland. Someone who helps researchers with this aspect of their work is Melanie Smith, a former law lecturer who now works as an academic coach, offering writing support for researchers at all stages of their careers. Yet how to manage time is rarely something that universities rarely teach young academics. How to use ‘20% time’ to manage pet projects In a 2022 survey of more than 3,200 graduate students around the world ( Nature 610, 805–808 2022), half worried that they would not finish their degrees on time and more than two-thirds reported struggles with work–life balance. Keep it simpleĪsk any doctoral candidate what they find challenging about their work, and time management tends to be up there. “Nowadays, tracking is a part of me - I track everything,” he says. Time tracking, he found, was a great motivator, as well as a way to organize his work, and it became a skill that he now uses every day while managing complex clinical-research projects for TASK. “It allowed me to put timelines of when I wanted to complete each chapter and allowed me to estimate timelines and log actual time spent against the estimate.” The app enabled him to generate reports detailing his performance, which led to his accountability levels increasing and his productivity improving “exponentially”. ![]() ![]() Then, “everything changed” when he tried an app called Jira - a tool developed by the software company Atlassian for collaboration across teams, but which he found ideal for his thesis writing. He started by blocking out times in his Google Calendar to work on his thesis, then tried different time-tracking apps, which helped him to focus. “Nobody spoke to me about time management,” says Mubaiwa, who gained his PhD this year and now works as a project manager for TASK, a clinical-research institute based in Cape Town, South Africa. How to accomplish that was something he had to work it out himself. It had been easy to focus in the lab, but he would now be writing off-campus while juggling a full-time job working as a warehouse pharmacist. “I had a lab notebook I completed every day, and I had a research plan, so I knew exactly what I needed to do, and when.”īut as Mubaiwa moved on to writing his doctoral thesis, managing his performance became a lot more complicated. “I spent 10 hours in the lab a day, 5 days a week,” the South African says. ![]() Credit: Mariam Al kassar/Shutterstockįor his PhD in drug design and development, Byron Mubaiwa found planning and executing his laboratory work a breeze. Keeping track of time is key not only to working efficiently but also to maintaining a healthy work–life balance. ![]()
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